Meetup In 9 days
November
Tuesday
17:30–20:00 2026 · Chicago time
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📌 AI Apps Don’t Fail Because of the Tech Alone - They Fail When People Don’t Adopt Them with Andjelka Djukic
A great demo gets attention. Getting people to use your AI product in their everyday work is a different challenge. Drawing on practical examples from SaaS, EdTech, and digital marketing, Andjelka Djukic explores where adoption breaks down: confusing onboarding, poor workflow fit, lack of trust, and the gaps between what teams build, sell, and users actually need. We’ll look at how product and development teams can spot these problems earlier and build adoption into delivery, with time for discussion and experiences from the room.
Andjelka Djukic is Head of Sales and Marketing at Eclincher and Co-Founder of Innovative Women of Serbia. Her work across SaaS, education technology, and international business development gives her a close-up view of what happens when technology meets real working habits. With a background in education, she brings a perspective on learning, trust, and organizational culture to conversations about AI adoption.
📌 Polling Is a Backstop, Not a Clock: Building High-Precision Durable Timers with Oluwafemi Shobande
Backend systems are full of timers: retries, TTLs, leases, scheduled jobs, sleeps. A common way to find what is due is to run a loop that wakes up on a fixed interval and checks the database. That ties precision and cost together. Poll more often and timers fire closer to their deadline, but every replica does more database work, even when nothing is happening. This talk is about breaking that link. The ideas are inspired by firm timers, first proposed for Linux in 2002, and by applying similar ideas at the application layer in Aiki, an open source durable workflow framework created by me. But the design applies to any service that needs to fire things on time.
Oluwafemi is the creator of Aiki, an open-source durable execution framework. Before working on Aiki full-time, he was a senior engineer at Bolt, where he helped build the company's on-demand food and grocery delivery business from its early days. Previously, he worked on real-time audio and video infrastructure for Microsoft Teams and distributed ledger technology at Interswitch, Nigeria's first unicorn.
📌 Confidence Is a Lie (and You Can Get Good at Telling It) with Caren Young
“Just be more confident” is useless advice. Attendees leave with things they can use in their next meeting, like “Know your outcome before you walk in the room” and “Get micro-yeses along the way.”
Caren was Manager of Product Management at Pivotal Labs, then a senior PM at California’s Department of Health Care Services and a product ops lead at HHS, and she's now a product coach and consultant. She's sat in plenty of rooms where design, development, and delivery each thought the problem belonged to someone else. She's also a stage performer and producer (twelve years), which turns out to be an unreasonably good way to learn how to be heard when the people in the room aren't always fans.
📣 If you're interested in speaking at an upcoming meetup, please email Bennett at [email protected].
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